1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to a spam control system, and in particular, the present invention relates to an improved system and method to control email whitelists.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many users of email use blacklists and whitelists included within their email software to control undesired spam, or junk, email from undesired email sources. A blacklist is a list of email addresses or domain names from which email is blocked. A whitelist is a list of email addresses or domain names from which email is allowed.
Typically, an email user's email software may provide a feature whereby if an email is received from an email address/domain name, a button or a link can be manually selected by a user to have the email address of the received email added to either a blacklist or a whitelist, that is to block or to allow email from that address in the future. In other cases, programs exist to mass-manage a large number of email and domain addresses and automatically blacklist or whitelist them. In either case, a user must still examine the email address and domain name of the received email to determine whether the email address/domain name should be whitelisted or blacklisted. There are also email programs that include a predefined, but regularly updated, list of email addresses/domain names that are known to be sources of spam email. When using such an email program, when a received email includes an address/domain name that matches an entry on the spam list, the received email is automatically blacklisted for the user by the email program.
However, there are times when a user is performing an online activity, such as making an online purchase on a website or registering for a blog, a newsletter or an online forum, such that the user desires and expects to receive emails from that site/domain. Unless the user adds the email address/domain name of that website manually to the whitelist of their email program or browser, emails from that source may end up being automatically tagged as spam, automatically added to their email blacklist, and unnecessarily blocked from being received in the future. Also, the user may not anticipate that an email address may be from a domain different from that of the actual website which was visited by the user, while still desiring to receive email from that other domain. Therefore, for at least this situation, a novel email spam control solution is needed.